


Lady Luck & Four Leaf Clovers

by hansbekhart



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood and Violence, But also dad jokes, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Character Resurrection, Gladiator Shiro (Voltron), M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Seriously tho does Keith know the future or what, So yeah it's a Shiro fic, Violence, Voltron plot holes, dad jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 18:13:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: Memory has been a strange thing for Shiro for a while. He’s never talked to anyone about it but if he did, he’d probably say, “I don’t remember when it started.” And then he’d laugh. Maybe they’d laugh too.





	Lady Luck & Four Leaf Clovers

 

The first few days of being alive again are overwhelming.

His heart moves blood around his sluggish body. His limbs weigh thousands of pounds. The movement of a toe feels like shifting a mountain. He’s forgotten what it felt like to breathe, how to do it, how to just let the body inhale and exhale. Every noise enters his ears at the same volume. His body trembles with electrical impulses and exhaustion. The smell of the air around him is bewildering, full of sensations he’s forgotten how to name. He flinches when his hair scrapes against the pod he’s lying in, when his legs move on their own, when the others are talking near him, and when everything is silent.

Then Keith says his name, and Shiro slips under again.

 

-

 

The hair is a surprise. He doesn’t see it until he’s been alive again for two days, when he manages to beg his way into a shower.

There are toilets in each Lion, each a different shape and configuration. Black and Yellow have showers too, although no one’s figured out if it was something the first paladins did, or just because their cargo holds are big enough for it. There’s no mirror, but the walls are polished and shiny, clear enough that Shiro used to make faces at himself in its surface.

He doesn’t make faces now. Just sits slumped against the wall, staring at himself, as Keith gets the water ready. He’d tried to walk to the bathroom by himself and couldn’t. Tried to heat the water himself, and couldn’t. Tried to get to his teammates and couldn’t, not until it was almost too late.

He touches the white hair. It’s all over his skull now, not just the stripe he mostly avoided looking at. The Shiro in the wall does the same thing, rubs the pad of one thumb over white eyebrows. Well, he thinks, it was probably inevitable. Not as bad as waking up with a metal arm. Speaking of which -

“Lemme help with that,” Keith says. His voice is scratchy in Shiro’s ears, hard to hear over the drone of water. His hands are cold - gentle - pushing Shiro’s hands away from where he’d been trying to strip the edges of the flight suit away from what’s left of his arm now.

“I uh,” Shiro says. He sounds drunk even to himself. “I thought I had a few more inches here.”

Keith goes very still. In the wall’s reflection, Shiro watches him look up, and then back down to the task at hand. The suit is probably ruined - there’s not actually that much damage to it, but the edges have fused to whatever it is where Shiro’s shoulder used to be, where now is just metal and a gaping, glowing hole that he can’t stop looking down at.

“You don’t remember?” Keith asks.

Shiro shakes his head _no._  He’s almost used to it by now.

“We thought maybe you would have,” Keith says, and then trails off.

Shiro shakes his head. “Just me in here,” he says. He thinks. He hopes.

Keith’s hands are shaking. His fingertips are just barely touching Shiro’s skin, where he’d been working the suit carefully off. “I don’t really know what happened,” he admits. “There was this, this purple light, and you started screaming. When you stood up your whole arm was metal.”

Shiro lifts his body away from the wall, craning his neck. Keith’s hands move to his sides, holding up Shiro’s uneven weight, and then he gets what Shiro’s trying to do. “Here,” he says. “Stop.”

Shiro stops.

He ends up slumped forward against Keith’s chest, nose pressed against Keith’s collarbone. Neck craned so that he can watch Keith work the back of his suit down, and show Shiro’s new body to himself.  

The bathroom is filling with steam. They stare at Shiro’s back until the polished wall has fogged all the way over, struck silent by the span of metal there. It doesn’t make sense. His old prosthetic had made sense, had an _end_ . But this - there’s so _much_ , and he feels just the same, as if his shoulder blade and muscles and ribs are all still there, just underneath.

“We’ll get Pidge to scan it,” Keith says. His fingers trace over the edge of the metal. The heel of his hand is braced against Shiro’s spine. When Shiro breathes in, all he can smell is Keith, overheated and comforting. It’s the first smell he’s been able to put a name to.

“Sure,” he sighs.

Together they peel down the rest of Shiro’s suit. The stink of his own body makes him gag, but Keith, unmoved, slips under Shiro’s arm and guides him under the spray of water. There’s even a box for Shiro to sit on, which looks like something Keith grabbed at random from the cargo hold.

Keith gives him a bottle of shampoo, which Shiro takes, but for a moment all he can do is sit and feel the water. It surrounds him, deafening all his other senses. It wets down the white hair, slips between his parted lips, warms the ache running up and down his spine (which he has a name for too, now: he’d thought it was just part of the same exhaustion weighing him down, but just below all that metal is a bruise that spans most of his lower back, so purple it’s almost black). He tries to focus on the shampoo bottle, but his attention keeps slipping off to the side: drifting from the scar on top of his left foot, over the unmarked expanse of his thigh, up to the disconcerting burn mark on his other leg, shaped like a _hand_ \- and then his gaze snags and stops.

“Shiro?”

“Hmm?” Shiro says, and the world swims back into focus. Keith, standing outside of the shower with his arms crossed over his chest and a worried look on his face. “Oh. Sorry.”

“You okay?”

“Just thought I had a few more inches there too,” Shiro says, trying for a joke because the truth is too strange to admit, which is that he used to be circumcised, and now he’s not.

Keith chews his lip instead of laughing, though. Tough crowd. Then he sighs, and starts stripping off his clothes. Shiro watches him do it, tilting his chin up as Keith strides forward, joining Shiro under the water. He leaves his underwear on. The water slicks his hair down, cascades over his shoulders. He’s got scars that Shiro doesn’t recognize. He takes the bottle of shampoo out of Shiro’s hand and tips it upside down, squirting a little into his own hands. He hands the bottle back to Shiro.

“How long has it been?” Shiro asks him.

“Since you -”

“Mmm.”

Keith moves out of Shiro’s line of vision. He flickers as he walks, as Shiro’s eyes get heavier and heavier. He’s startled by the feel of Keith’s hands in his hair, but he’s so _tired_ \- all he can manage is a quick inhale of overheated air and then a soft groan, so quiet it barely makes its way out of his throat. Keith is washing his hair. His thumbs dig gently behind Shiro’s ears, under the curve of his skull. His palms press against Shiro’s temples. He’s thorough about it, and each touch sends sparks all the way down into Shiro’s toes. He’s shivering, but Keith doesn’t seem to notice.

“About a year,” Keith says, finally.

Shiro opens his eyes, tries to focus them. “But you’re,” he says, his tongue thick in his mouth, “you look. You’re so much taller.”

Keith tilts Shiro’s head back to rinse the shampoo out of it. “It was longer for me,” he says, which doesn’t make much sense, but Shiro spent a year dead and trapped in the consciousness of a robotic space lion, and he’s too tired to question.

“You look good,” he says instead, because Keith does: he looks handsome and confident and healthy. But if Shiro’s too tired to question why a year wasn’t a year for Keith, he’s also too tired to pretend like he’s someone this grown man should still look up to. And anyway, he still wants to see Keith laugh. He taps his own cheek with two fingers, meaning the scar. “Very cool. Suits you.”

Keith doesn’t laugh. He stares down at Shiro, his expression stricken. Water thunders over the shape of the words he tries and fails to speak. Shiro waits. His vision dims and lifts. He’s listed over to his left side, pulled off balance by where he doesn’t have an arm anymore, and at some point Keith moves close enough to take Shiro’s weight. He feels warm and strong and so, so comforting.

“It was me,” Keith finally chokes out, his whole body shaking with the effort of it. “I cut your arm off.”

“Oh,” Shiro says faintly. Keith’s still staring at him, eyes wide. The side of his face is lit up from the light coming from Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro licks water off his lips and says, “Well I - I’m sure you had a good reason.”

Keith’s arms go around him and hold on. His hair drips down Shiro’s chest. Shiro tips his cheek against Keith’s temple, and lets himself drift away.

  
-

 

Memory has been a strange thing for Shiro for a while. He’s never talked to anyone about it but if he did, he’d probably say, “I don’t remember when it started.” And then he’d laugh. Maybe they’d laugh too.

Here’s what he remembers:

He remembers coming back to himself with his back up against a cold stone wall and his knees up against his chest. He remembers the smell of sticky blood and his own sweat. Matt was there too. Sitting up against the wall next to Shiro with his leg badly bandaged. He was crying silently. No one else was near them, even though the cell was small; the other prisoners were clumped along the walls, as far away as they could get. No one else was hurt. No one else had had to fight.

He’d lifted his head and looked at Matt. He’d never seen Matt cry before. Not when they’d been captured. Not when they took Commander Holt away. He was numb all over in a way he didn’t get to be anymore; even the twitching and cramping in his arms and legs were just distant noise. His mind was perfectly, achingly blank, so mostly what he’d worried about was whether he’d cut Matt’s leg deep enough to really hurt him. The deep gash on his face had itched less than the drying blood that covered him like a Halloween mask.

“Matt,” he’d said. “What’s wrong?”

The memory is crystal clear, each detail so sharp in his mind. The shitty job Matt had done with the bandages on his leg, knotted up like shoelaces. The sweat stains on Matt’s shirt. The smell of the straw they put on the ground in the cells, to soak up whatever got spilled there. The exact quality of the light filtering through from the little guard window, as Shiro lifted two filthy hands up for inspection.

But that’s the thing. It didn’t happen that way.

The last time he saw Matt Holt was on the ramp up to the gladiator pit. The very walls were shaking with the roar of the crowd. Matt’s fear had been thick enough to coat the back of Shiro’s throat. After he pushed Matt down, they took Shiro up into the light and he didn’t see Matt again. When they dumped him back down in the cells, Matt had just been _gone_ , and it was only thin, stubborn hope that told Shiro he’d been sent away with his father. He never sat in a cell next to Shiro and cried. He never cried in front of Shiro at all.

And anyway, it wasn’t until weeks later that someone had cut Shiro’s face open for him. That’s the only part of the memory that might really have happened: the way the other prisoners had kept away from him. He cleaned all the blood off by himself, and scratched at the wound in his sleep, and even now the scar tissue pulls whenever he smiles.

  
-

 

Shiro wakes up with an enormous figure looming over him, outlined in purple, and reacts instinctively. Reacts poorly. In the haze between consciousness and otherwise he forgets he only has one arm now, and throws his full body weight into a punch that can’t happen. The momentum carries him right off the cot and onto the floor. From that vantage he looks up and up and _up_ , and realizes he tried to punch Keith’s mom in the face.

Krolia puts a hand under his elbow and lifts him back up onto the cot effortlessly. There’s a wry look on her face that’s unnerving because it’s an expression he’s seen a million times on Keith’s face, and he’s not sure how to read it when it’s on hers.

“Is everyone okay?” he asks.

The corner of her mouth tips up a little further. “Everyone’s fine,” she answers. “Are you?”

He blinks at her. “You were having a nightmare,” she says, when he doesn’t say anything. Like a magic trick he notices that he’s covered in sweat; that his heart is pounding; that his face and fingertips are numb; that he’s bitten his tongue.

“I just,” he says, “I’m fine. Just - could use some air.”

“Okay,” she says, but just looks at him for a long moment, her hands loose at her sides. “Sorry to have scared you, Shiro,” she says finally, her words carefully measured out.

Shiro puts a hand over his chest, presses down on the familiar sensation of his heart thudding too hard. He could lie and say it was just the nightmare - but he likes her, and besides, she’s Keith’s mom. He looks up and meets her gaze. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it, Krolia.”

He doesn’t remember what the nightmare was about. He’s been getting flashes, contextless, that could be things that happened to this body or anything at all. He never really recovered all of the memories from his time in the Galran prisons; he just stopped talking about it. Haggar had said, “ _You could have been our greatest weapon_ ,” and Shiro had decided that there were a lot of things in the universe not worth knowing about.

He thinks he was dreaming about falling, but he’s not sure that he wants to know about that either.

He finds Hunk and Lance outside, talking quietly. It’s barely evening, or what passes for evening on the planet they came to rest on, and they’ve got a little fire going. He comes to sit in the circle of stones around the fire, and tips his chin back to look up at the stars. They’re just barely visible in the evening haze. He doesn’t notice the way that the others fall silent, hyper-aware of his presence even though he’s just sitting, just sitting.

“Hey, you hungry?” Hunk says, finally.

It’s the first time he’s been outside since Keith and Allura bundled his newly alive body back into Black and the pod they’d salvaged from the Castle’s medical bay. Everything seems so _big_ \- the air in his lungs, the weight of his body against the stone, the unending rock beneath his feet.

“Shiro? Shiro, you hungry?”

“Earth to Shiro -”

Lance waves a hand in front of his face. Shiro smiles at him. “Hey guys,” he says. “Sure, what’s on the menu?”

Hunk and Lance share a look that Shiro doesn’t see. “Well,” Hunk says, “I was saving that Yallilitian Devil Ray for your birthday, but I guess this is kind of like a birthday for you, right? Anyway, I found some herbs a few weeks ago that I _think_ will give it the same smoky flavor you liked so much when we had it on Reiphod. Didn’t get a chance to try the recipe out before the Castle went kaput, but as you know I work miracles. Sound good?”

Shiro smiles at him too. He has no idea what Hunk’s talking about. He’s never heard of Yallilitian Devil Ray. He doesn’t know where Reiphod is, if it’s a city or planet or something else. “Sounds great,” he says and then, “Oh, hello,” when his fingers suddenly find themselves deep into thick blue fur. Keith’s space wolf blinks up at him. Shiro blinks back. It’s enormous. It smells like a dog and it’s vibrating in a way that Shiro’s not really sure is a purr or a growl. It nudges its chin into his hand. Shiro scratches the chin, which is wet with drool. The purr, or growl, increases in intensity.

He looks up to find that Lance is watching him, a strange look on his face. Lance also looks different from how Shiro remembers him.

He hadn’t been one of Shiro’s recruits. He remembers that, or at least doesn’t remember tracking Lance’s progress the way he’d kept tabs on every one of his cadets, even if Keith was the only one he promised the stars to. He’d recognized Lance as a Garrison student, _after_ , but he didn’t really remember what Lance had been like _before_ , if he’d always been gangly limbs and a voice that only got louder.

He doesn’t look older, exactly, the way Keith is. Older around the eyes, maybe. Maybe Shiro’s just never seen him hesitate before.

“You okay?” Shiro asks.

Lance flinches, but he doesn’t look away. “Shouldn’t we be asking you that?”

It sounds rhetorical, so Shiro doesn’t say anything. He tweaks the wolf’s ears, marveling at how thick and furry they are. The wolf grumbles and angles him back down towards its drooly chin. Shiro had a dog growing up, he thinks, but when he grasps for the shape of it in his memory all he finds is shaggy blue fur.

He doesn’t say, _I can’t remember what my parents looked like_. He doesn’t say, _I died. I actually died._

His fingers still. The furry blue chin whines and nudges pointedly at his hand, reminding him of his responsibilities. He just sits there, numb and speechless, and finally the wolf drops its heavy head directly on Shiro’s knee, blowing an annoyed breath up at him. Feeling like he’s standing outside of his own body, Shiro puts his hand back on its head. The fur under his fingertips is dense and oily, undeniably real.

“Shiro,” Lance says, tripping over the word. He looks alarmingly near tears. “Shiro, I’m so sorry. You tried to tell me something was wrong and I didn’t listen. I’m so sorry.” He doesn’t look away from Shiro as he speaks, with a seriousness that sparks something warm and grounding in Shiro’s chest.

“I’m sure you did the best you could,” Shiro tells him with all sincerity, even though he doesn’t remember trying to tell Lance anything. The apology is meaningless, just words cluttering up the air between them.

Lance shakes his head, and when he squeezes his eyes shut a tear really does slide down his cheek. Shiro thinks about reaching out with the hand he still has, about putting that hand on Lance’s shoulder and saying something to make him laugh.

“Aw, hey,” Hunk says, stepping back into their circle of light. He’s got a pan in one hand and a bowl in the other. He kneels, setting the food down on the circle of stones ringing in the fire, his face turned anxiously towards them. “Hey, come on. Lance, what’d we talk about?”

The bowl is full to the brim with what must be the raw ingredients of what Hunk was talking about, and as the fire warms them the smell drifts over to Shiro as if trying to crawl down his throat. It’s a clean smell, briny like the ocean, and Shiro breathes in and in and _in_.

“I know,” Lance says. Hunk’s hand is on Lance’s shoulder, and Lance is laughing, rubbing at his eyes. “I just -”

“Shiro knows we never would have left him, not really,” Hunk says. His smile includes Shiro, his look invites Shiro to join them. He puts his other hand on Shiro’s metal shoulder, unhesitating.

Keith and Pidge return when the Yala - Yali - when whatever Hunk is cooking is nearly finished. Keith with something that looks like a dead purple anteater slung over his shoulders, and Pidge loaded down with glittery rocks, which - Shiro looks into the fire - seems to be what they’re using for fuel. “Shiro, you’re up,” Keith says, a big smile on his face, and then, “Whoa, everyone okay?”

“Yeah,” Lance says. “We’re all good.” The smile doesn’t fade when he looks at Keith, which surprises Shiro too: there are still tears on Lance’s cheeks, unashamed of being seen.

When Shiro glances up, Keith’s expression is soft, sharing a world of wordless conversation with Lance. Keith’s mouth turns down; Lance shakes his head. The smile is shared, and the moment passes. Keith carefully transfers the dead animal from his shoulders to Lance’s, and the two of them and Hunk have a clipped conversation on processing and storing the meat. Pidge chucks a few of her rocks into the fire. When they collide they clack like children’s toys and leave rainbow sparks on the back of his eyelids.

Keith settles in next to him, close enough that his thigh slots up against Shiro’s, like he’d known it would keep Shiro from floating off into all that cold black air above their heads. He doesn’t look at Shiro as he talks. No one else does either, except for Pidge. No one seems to expect Shiro to say anything. So he listens, as Keith leads.

They’ll break camp after the second watch. Tasks are handed out: water collection and purification, a final round of checks for each lion, inventory of food and weapons, confirmation of the planned route back to Earth, incorporating Krolia’s input on Blades’ safehouses. Keith’s division of labor is thoughtful and equitable (even Shiro gets a job, which is to inventory other supplies taken from the Castle of Lions: something he can do sitting down, pointing the scanner at each container to log its contents into a single database). Allura offers suggestions, which are discussed by the group and accepted, ultimately, by Keith.

Shiro knows he’s drifting. The conversation is hard to follow. It flows over and around him, like a rock worn smooth and unnecessary. He follows body language instead of words. Watches the others watch Keith, look to him for confirmation and orders. Shiro loves it. He’d always known Keith could do this. He feels drunk on the quiet trust on the paladins’ faces.

\- and marvels, abruptly, that they’re _still_ like that, so stupidly gullible, even after how easily he’d laid them all out on the bridge. Only Hunk ever thought of analyzing an enemy’s techniques for weaknesses, which was why it was important to take him out first -

Pidge throws another glittery stone into the fire, and another shower of rainbow sparks paint the air. Shiro jumps when it happens, and Keith’s hand settles easily on his thigh, squeezing once just above his knee, where the scar he used to have made him so ticklish. It’s close enough that he still feels like Keith dipped his fingertips directly into Shiro’s spine. But he doesn’t flinch. Not when he’s pinned like this, trapped by Pidge’s gaze.

She’s watchful. Eyes narrowed, chin poking forward. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at him from across the licking flames. It will take her another four days to corner him, fists clenched at her side. Four days of nightmares that feel like memories to Shiro before she finds him and tells him that next time, next time she’ll be able to take the shot. Four days until he makes her promise that she will, and moves his things over onto the Green lion, to make it easier for her to keep that promise.

Now, Hunk shifts in between them, and when Shiro looks up he’s holding out a bowl of stew that smells like clean ocean air and warm, comforting smoke. Shiro balances it on his knees, accepts the spoon Hunk presses into his remaining hand, and digs in.

It’s delicious, and he’s never tasted anything like it.

  
-

 

Shiro never wanted to die. Not ever, not for a minute. But in the pits, he’d expected to. It only made sense. He was bigger and stronger than most of the prisoners, but not as big and strong as the gladiators they were pitted against. The guards had taken his muscle stimulators along with the rest of their gear, and the most he could ask for each day was that the pain wouldn’t be so bad he couldn’t use the pitiful weapons they were handed. To expect to live through all of it seemed insane, an ambition even too big for him.

He was bigger and stronger than most of the other prisoners, so he kept doing what he’d done for Matt: each day he pushed to the front and demanded blood, and fought whatever monster stepped onto the sand until there was no one left to fight. That, too, made sense. He’d known immediately why old, sick, starving prisoners would be rounded up ten or twenty at a time and sent up to the pits, and the only thing worse than dying would have been to be the only one who lived through it.

The Galra would send them out as bait before the _real_ gladiator fights, as a nice easy slaughter to set the mood. Blood on the sand snapped the audience to attention, so they couldn’t start planning coups in their seats. It seemed like there was nothing the Galra loved more than a massacre - but it turned out that even they liked an underdog.

He thinks it took the other prisoners a long time to figure out what Shiro was doing. It’s context that tells him this: that he’d cleaned the blood off his face by himself, that he’d spend hours raving in the cells, with no one willing to tell him he was talking to ghosts. The other prisoners huddled together for comfort but never him, never with him. Which made sense. The guards would hose him down at the end of each day but he’d still find dried blood under his nails, flakes falling onto his shoulders when he scratched his scalp.

They all thought he was a murderer, that he was thriving in the pits - all of them, the Galra, the other prisoners. Even Adam, when his specter came around. “This is why you left me,” he’d say, and he’d smear some of the grime off Shiro’s cheek and rub it between his fingertips.

Shiro could appreciate the absurdity of that, even though at the time he thought Adam was real. And there might have been a little truth to it anyway. It turned out that Shiro was as good at killing as he was at everything else.

One day they opened the big gates and let Shiro stride onto the sand by himself. His world had been so narrow at that point. He’d practically ceased to think at all. The pain of his disease was about as meaningful as memories of Earth. He was the the grit of the sand, the stink of blood, the slow roll of sweat down his shoulders. The crowd cheered for _him_ , for their champion. Then, at the far end of the arena, the other gates opened.

He waited, patient as a snake. His fingers clenched around his weapons. His heart thudded in his chest, ready to win and win again.

But all that came through the gate was a loose, stumbling knot of old, sick, starving creatures, their faces turned fearfully up towards the light.

  
-

 

It takes a long time for Shiro to figure it out, for the possibility to even occur to him. In his defense, being alive is kind of a lot to deal with.

Living with Pidge in Green is nice. Fewer people, and less supervision. There’s always a task at hand, which mostly is cleaning up after Pidge, who is so indescribably messy it’s genuinely a wonder she wasn’t kicked out of the Garrison the first week.

He starts exercising again. It’s tough going. The body he’s got now nearly died after the fight that Keith has hesitantly told him only bits and pieces of, and only when pressed, and afterwards Shiro spent days in a feverish dream, barely able to walk, getting used to having to breathe again. He rigs up layers of padding and flexible ropes to compensate for his missing arm, but even then most of his old workouts seem like a joke. He keeps at it, collecting bruises.

The fifth morning of their slow journey through space, Pidge groans long and loud from under her nest of blankets and wires and scraps of food, and complains, “Do you really do this _every day?”_

“Discipline’s important,” Shiro tells her, between sit-ups. He’ll move to push-ups after this, as best he can. He hasn’t found a good balance yet between a hard enough surface to push off of, and a soft enough surface to over-correct and fall onto, but he’ll figure it out.

One bleary, judgemental eye emerges from the nest, so he adds cheerfully, knowing the reaction he’ll get, “Can’t program your way to fitness, Pidge!”

There’s an angry yowl, and the eye disappears in a swirl of blankets. Alien candy wrappers fall off the bed and onto the ground with little crinkling noises. One of Pidge’s weird furry pets startles into the air and drifts warily back down near where Shiro assumes are her feet.

He chuckles, a little breathless from the exercise. He’d been an okay teacher, never a great one ( _not like Adam_ , his brain supplies unhelpfully), but he’d liked it. Mostly he’d liked it because being around the kids gave him an opportunity to relax and joke around a little, even if a lot of the cadets were as serious as he’d been at that age and reacted to teasing with a sort of baffled rage, like it was a pop quiz in disguise. If he’d had Pidge as a student, would she have rolled with him the way Keith did? Or would she have hacked into his computer terminal, erased all his lesson plans, and rolled out?

Shiro uncurls, lets his body go slack. The floor of the cargo bay is cold against his back. His stomach muscles burn. His shoulder burns. It’s finally starting to feel good, like he’s building instead of tearing himself down. He doesn’t wait to catch his breath; he shifts over onto his belly and gets his palm braced beneath his heart. It’s a test of balance as much as strength, and he can’t help the grin that breaks over his face when he manages it.

He does one - two - three - four - five push-ups. Holds at the top of the fifth, the rest of his body a perfect plank. The only movement the controlled in and out of his breathing, every muscle -

His breath catches. He stares down at his spread fingertips without seeing them. A bead of sweat rolls down his temple and the line of his jaw, and lands between his thumb and first finger. He lowers himself down slowly. Feels the first tremor in his arm when he’s an inch off the ground and nearly drops the rest of the way, but it’s not - it’s not - it’s _not_.

He gets to his feet and stumbles out of the cargo hold. He doesn’t hear the questioning noise that Pidge makes as he goes. The cockpit is as quiet as any part of the lions get, insulated from the sound of gears and pistons and quintessence-drawn power that permeates their bodies. He taps at the controls, and Green allows it. Keith’s face comes up on screen - slumped sideways in his seat, dressed only in the undersuit, dozing without any armor.

“Keith,” Shiro says.

Keith startles, nearly slipping off his chair. “Shiro!” he says. “Uh, what’s up? You okay?”

Shiro licks his lips, and comes up absolutely blank. “Can you send the wolf over for me?” he says instead. “I need to check something over on Black.”

Keith’s concerned expression doesn’t change. “Sure,” he says. “Anything you need.” He whistles softly, glancing off screen. The wolf must be curled up at his feet or something. A second later it appears at Shiro’s side, tail thumping.

“Hi,” Shiro says, reaching out to pet it. Abruptly he’s standing in Black’s cockpit, close enough that he nearly falls into Keith’s lap. They’re alone; Krolia must be still sleeping, or up in Black’s quarters. “Thanks,” Shiro says to the wolf, and heads into the cargo bay. He’s aware of Keith trailing behind him, the way he’s always at least peripherally aware of Keith, but he doesn’t look back. If it turns out to be nothing -

If it’s just a fluke -

Well, he’ll deal with it.

The equipment they saved from the medical bay is tucked neatly away in one of the corners of Black’s hold. He pulls up the last recordings on the pod but it’s meaningless, the visual still shows him with half a damn arm. “Shiro,” Keith says, “what’s going on?”

Shiro ignores him, kneeling down to rummage around in Coran’s bins. The wolf sticks his heads into the bin as soon as it’s opened, and Shiro has to fight him a little for room. Pidge had been teaching him to read Altean in the few weeks running up to (when Shiro died) the operation to take down Zarkon, but he can’t focus long enough to actually parse any of it, digging through bin after bin until touch alone finds him something he recognizes. He pulls it up, triumphant, and then is stumped: he’s seen Coran use these little handheld scanners to diagnose everything from the sniffles to something he called Andorian Glottidis, but Shiro has no idea how to use it himself. There’s not even _buttons_ on the thing, it’s just a stout, smooth wand.

Shiro stares at it, frustration choking him, and Keith plucks it out of his hand. Spins it around and turns it on, easy as anything. “You just wanna do a general scan?” Keith asks, looking down at the device.

“Yes, exactly,” Shiro says, and has to push the wolf away again, where he’s huffing his smelly wolf breath into Shiro’s ear. “You might as well help me up,” he tells it irritably, and Keith laughs - and then abruptly sucks in a breath.

“Oh,” he says, and Shiro, still on his knees, echoes, “oh?”

Keith’s shoulders jump. For long moment he just stares down at Shiro, long enough that Shiro almost holds a hand out to take the scanner back.

“Keith?” Shiro prompts. The look on Keith’s face is making him nervous, and he’s already about to climb out of his own skin.

“S - sorry, uh,” Keith stutters, “I don’t, uh, I don’t. Whoa.”

He’s blushing. “Sorry,” he says again, and braces a hand under Shiro’s elbow to help him to his feet. “Felt like Slav for a second there.”

“Oh god no, anyone but him,” Shiro says wretchedly, and Keith laughs. The sound of it loosens up the clench around his throat, just a little.

It’s on the tip of Shiro’s tongue to explain - Keith is still the only one of the paladins who _knows_ , and just Coran otherwise, who spent too much time patching Shiro up after battles not to guess that something else was wrong, and anyway if anyone would understand what Shiro’s feeling now it’s Keith - but then Keith holds out his other hand.

Shiro puts his hand in Keith’s, his palm up towards the sky. The armor segments into three pieces over their arms - wrist to forearm, bicep, the shoulder guard. There’s a button on the side of the gauntlets that allows you to snap them on or off like bracelets. Shiro can’t take his off anymore, not by himself. Keith undoes Shiro’s forearm plate with practiced ease, setting it aside. He’s gloveless, and he works cold fingers into the thin line between Shiro’s gloves and the sleeve of the undersuit, baring Shiro up to the soft crook of his arm. The tremble in his fingertips tickle Shiro’s skin.

Keith doesn’t look down as he slots the scanner against Shiro’s arm, so Shiro doesn’t either. He can’t breathe. He’s standing outside of his own body, which even now feels strange and unfamiliar. His whole world feels cupped in the palm of Keith’s hand. The place that the scanner is touching him goes hot and then cold and then numb.

Hope is a painful squeeze in his chest, that beats in time with the press of Keith’s thumb over his pulse, tethering him to the ground.

The scanner beeps, and the air between them lights up as it displays its results. From Shiro’s perspective they’re backwards and also in Altean, so he watches Keith to learn his fate. Keith’s eyes flick back and forth over the text, and his lips part. Shiro’s trembling all over with electrical impulses and exhaustion.

“You were right,” Keith says, and Shiro’s knees unlock, his weight sending them both stumbling into the pod before he can catch himself. He hears the scanner drop to the ground and go spinning away, but so much louder and more important is Keith saying, “You’re not sick anymore. It’s gone.”

“Gone,” Shiro repeats. Oh god, he’s going to cry. “You’re - you’re sure?”

Keith nods, his back still up against the pod, his arms winding around Shiro’s shoulders, drawing him close. They’re pressed together, Shiro’s fingers clutching at the back of Keith’s suit, and he’s saying things that don’t make sense to Shiro, “I thought so the whole time, but I can’t tell _when_ things happen or if they’re even gonna happen in _this_ timeline or a different one, I don’t know how all of this stuff works, so I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong, Shiro, _Shiro_ -”

Shiro kisses him.

There’s no forethought to it, just the impulse and the action and hope thudding its way through his veins. Keith kisses back eagerly, his hands turned to fists that Shiro can’t feel through the armor, just pressure along his back, pulling him off balance.

He wants - god, he wants _everything_ , he wants so _much_ , he wants to peel Keith’s suit off and have him up against the pod he almost died in, he wants to choke Keith on his cock, he wants to take him apart and hear him _scream_ -

The violence shocks him. He pushes Keith away and blurts out, “Sorry!”

“For _what?_ ” Keith demands. “This is how it _happens_.” He looks dazed and furious and - _god_ , so _hot_. His mouth is red where Shiro was biting him. His hips are moving restlessly where Shiro’s got him pinned against the pod. He managed to unhook part of Shiro’s chest armor without Shiro really noticing and it’s hanging crazily off to the side. Every nerve in Shiro’s body feels lit up. He’s going to live.

Keith shoves up against him, trying to drag Shiro back into him, and on instinct Shiro fists a hand in his hair and shoves back. The noise Keith makes sounds like it was punched out of him and Shiro can barely remember anymore why this is a bad idea, not when Keith is one long line of hard muscle arching against him. He’s going to _live_.

He pulls Keith up towards him by the hair, intending to bite and suck down the column of Keith’s throat, and then something clicks.

“How what happens,” Shiro says.

His mouth is close enough to Keith’s skin that his breath makes Keith shudder. It’s a visible effort for Keith to open his eyes. “What? What happened?” he pants, and then stiffens under Shiro as the words catch up.

Shiro eases up on Keith’s hair, puts a few millimeters of space between their bodies. He’s so turned on that it’s hard to think about anything but Keith’s wet mouth. _Focus_ , Shirogane. “Wh - what did you say about timelines,” he says.

“My mom and I lived in a time vortex for two years,” Keith says. His tone is angry, as if this is something he’s told Shiro before, which maybe is true - Shiro might have focused on the _giant space whale_ aspect of that, but -

“Keith, do you know the future?”

Keith looks down. The look on his face isn’t shifty - he doesn’t think Keith’s ever bothered to lie to him - just uncertain. “I know a lot of things,” he admits finally, after long seconds where the air between them cools.

“You knew Haggar cured me,” Shiro says, and Keith nods. “You knew about - this,” he says, meaning the two of them, and Keith sighs.

“It could have been - wishful thinking,” he says.

“You never said anything,” Shiro says, watching him closely.

Keith shrugs. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Shiro, I know - _a lot_ of things. Not just about you, but about Voltron, about Earth, about all of us. My mom and I saw a lot of stuff happen - but what if it wasn’t the future, just possibilities? What if I screw things up by trying to change things?”

“Please don’t turn into Slav,” Shiro says, “I couldn’t handle it.”

Keith bites his lip. His fingers tap and tug on Shiro’s belt buckle, but it feels restless, not purposely distracting. Not any more distracting than the rest of him, anyway. “I’m being serious, Shiro.”

“So am I,” Shiro says. He bends, and Keith reaches up to meet him. It feels different to kiss him this time, with intention, slow and wet and heavy. He misses his other arm more than he has at any point since he woke up in this body.

In the end, it’s an easy decision, and an easy order. “Don’t do anything,” he says, and rests his forehead against Keith’s. He closes his eyes and says it again quietly into the space between them. “Don’t do anything. Just be there when we need you.”

  
-

 

Shiro isn’t sure, but.

There’s no way of knowing, but he thinks -

He thinks maybe ...

Maybe, he died before.

It’s the arm that makes him think that. Because the problem hadn’t been his arm. It had been his leg.

When he’d seen the bait prisoners stagger out onto the sand, he knew what was going to happen, and he did it anyway.

He threw down his weapons. He walked to the middle of the arena to do it, so there could be no doubt. He watched understanding dawn over the faces of the other prisoners as the roars of the audience rose around them. He listened to the barrier field behind him sizzle and snap as the guards let something else onto the sand.

Death was preferable to being what the Galra thought he was, but he still hadn’t meant to die. He’d just been too slow to get his weapons back. He’d tried to yank the sword out of the sand, and his hand had cramped so badly his knuckles almost brushed the inside of his wrist. When he felt the crackle of some kind of energy he’d flung himself sideways, away from the sword, but there hadn’t even been enough time to get a real look at the thing that was about to kill him much less figure out its range, and he didn’t get far enough away.

The energy bolt hit him in the leg. A lucky shot high up in the thigh, slicing open his femoral artery.

He doesn’t remember pain. He doesn’t remember hitting the sand and trying to roll out of the dive, and not being able to. He doesn’t remember being confused when he’d looked down and saw his entire pant leg was already soaked through with blood. How different the color of arterial blood was on the sand, so shockingly bright before it was absorbed into gritty clay.

For a brief second he knew what was going to happen. That he had minutes before he bled out, and that there was nothing he could do about that. This was it. He wasn’t going to make it out after all.

He tried to stand and couldn’t. Tried to crawl towards his sword, still stuck in the sand yards away, and couldn’t. He heard the heavy, dragging footsteps of the other gladiator coming towards him. He felt every beat of his stupid heart, pushing more and more blood out onto the sand. The screams of the crowd were a fever pitch and then all Shiro could hear were his own heaving lungs, trying desperately to take just one more breath, please, just one more.

What he remembers is that someone called his name. That he’d looked up through dimming eyes and seen Keith standing over him, one hand braced on his knee, the other held out for Shiro to take. He remembers thinking that it didn’t seem so bad, that it had turned out like this. He knew Keith had come to take him home.

Then he’d woken up.

He’d woken up, and he had a jagged scar across the inside of his thigh, and half his hair had turned white, and his right hand had been taken and replaced with something else. He wasn’t dead. He was something else.

“You’ll go back into the pits tomorrow,” said the doctor who’d taken his arm, a fang slipping out from under his pale lips as he grimaced. “The witch wants to see what you can do with that.”

When they’d taken him back to the cells, he’d heard the whispers grow as he passed by each door. _Champion. Champion_. _Champion_. But he didn’t remember why.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to Eia (@appease) for the beta, and plunging into VLD with me! This was super fun. Hope we all still like each other in three days!
> 
> You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/hansbekhart), [tumblr](http://hansbekhart.tumblr.com/), and [pillowfort.](https://www.pillowfort.io/Hansbekhart)


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